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  • Planters’ Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia
  • Steven G. Collins (bio)
Planters’ Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia. By Chad Morgan . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xi+163. $55.

In Planters' Progress, Chad Morgan grapples with Southern ideology and its impact on Southern industrialization. He argues that antebellum planters wanted economic modernization, but that "economic barriers retarded Southern manufacturing to such an extent that antebellum industrialists had at best an extremely slim chance of developing the region's manufacturing" [End Page 201] (p. 15). Thus, only secession and Civil War allowed the South, and its hegemonic planters, to modernize as they wished—with state-controlled industrialization. Indeed, Morgan asserts that "slavery, progress, and laissez-faire could not coexist" (p. 27). The South, therefore, chose slavery and progress and dispensed with laissez-faire economics during the war. Although Morgan's thesis parallels recent historiography showing that many Southerners embraced industry and railroad development, historians of technology will find few insights into Southerners' views of technological change and its influence on Southern culture.

Morgan begins the book with a descriptive examination of antebellum manufacturing. He cites numerous reasons why the South did not industrialize, including planters' investment in land and slaves, a poor credit system, Northern competition, and geographical obstructions. Those who study the antebellum economy will find much to dispute. Although I agree with many of Morgan's assertions, some require more in-depth analysis. For example, he avers that Southern railroads attracted more investment than did manufacturing, because railroads allowed planters to acquire stock by leasing slaves to the railroad companies. This ignores the reality that as soon as cotton prices rose in the 1850s, planters put slaves to work to expand their fields, and, consequently, railroads confronted a labor shortage. In other words, planters made a rational decision about the best return on their bound labor. Even though Morgan cites geographical factors as hindering industrialization, he does not make use of important works by historical geographers.

The author focuses much attention on the Confederate ordnance department's role in helping to industrialize Georgia during the war. He shows how ordnance plants grew rapidly in Atlanta, Augusta, Macon, and Columbus, emphasizing that these Confederate-owned industries fit Southern planters' conceptions of safe, state-controlled development. Regrettably, he misses a key reality: West Point graduates or "soldier technologists," not planters, led this economic revolution. Nor does Morgan consider the importance of technological transfer to the South. George Rains, for instance, designed the Confederate Powder Works after the Waltham Abbey Powder Works in England. Morgan would have greatly enhanced his argument by examining technological change and diffusion taking place in industry: in interchangeable parts, for example, as well as in agricultural innovation.

The most interesting and original part of the book concerns the relative dependence of Southern industry on slave labor and women during the war: "[T]hrough a combination of repression, segregation, and outright luck, Confederate Georgia avoided some of the more disruptive consequences that might have attended rapid industrialization" (p. 86). Morgan argues that "the cult of white womanhood" led to almost "total exclusion of white women from ordnance manufacture" (p. 77). Slaves mainly provided unskilled labor and rarely functioned as machinists or in skilled positions. [End Page 202] After getting permission from slaveholders, John Mallet, head of the Central Laboratory, began paying wages for slaves' completion of extra tasks, allowed their wives and children to accompany them, and tried to supply adequate food and clothing.

Morgan brings important insights into how Confederate industry adapted to fit into a slave society. Urbanization brought profound changes; enslaved African Americans found more freedom and less supervision in the growing urban environments. State and local governments took significant steps to control the growing population, but urbanization "clearly tested Georgia's peculiar institution" (p. 91).

Planters' Progress contributes to our understanding of the economic modernization of the South during the Civil War. Even though much of the argument is familiar and will enjoy general agreement, especially among younger Southern historians, those unfamiliar with Southern histori-ography will here find a nice, brief overview of the impact of the war on Southern industry. T&C readers are likely, however, to finish the book with as...

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